When We All Drown In The Streams...

Today the grand vizier of the Disney Empire announced initial pricing for a bundle of the upcoming Disney+ service.  Bundled with Hulu and ESPN it'll run you $12.99 per month.  Now given the content this might seem reasonable.

Here's my problem with this.  The average household is not going to walk away with a $12.99 a month bill.  To begin with, to stream the stream you need an interned connection that'll need to have a decent speed and stability.  If you live in a rural area or a town or a part of a city that's underserved by a decent high speed network, you're probably out of luck at the starting line.  If you do have decent internet, you're already paying $40-70 or so a month for it.  If you have a basic or better cable package already, add another $40-100 to your entertainment bill.

But that's not all.

What if you want more than the Disney offering?  What about your Netflix fix?  Another $15 or so a month.

And soon enough, Warner Bros will be trotting out a service that'll likely bundle their vast library plus HBO and likely the DC Universe streamer as well.  I'm pegging it at no less than $15 a month, maybe $20. 

Soooooo....

Disney, Netflix, WB tally up at about $45 a month.  Plus an average $60 for your cable.  Plus another $50 for the internet to make all those streams flow.  $155 a month if you want it all.  That's before pay per view, specialty channels and whatever else you might be convinced to add to your increasingly bloated entertainment budget...

Using those numbers, that's $1860 a year for tv and tv related services.  Even if you "cut the cord" and just do streams and the net, it's still $95 a month, $1140  a year.  Obviously package choice, the area you live in and add ons will change the tally.

So, what's my point here?  The point, dear reader, is that we're seeing the beginning of a culture shift in the tv landscape.  Years from now when the historians look back a the early 2020s, they'll be noting how this was the point that we lost any claim to a shared television culture.  Within a decade there will be distinct differences between the haves who stream it all and have access to everything and anything they choose to watch and the have-somes who will be forced to choose one stream or one cable type service to fit their budget and lose all touch with the content on "the other guys" services. 

Probably not enough to cause a civil war, but it might make us set up separate but equal water coolers for the Disney-ites and the Netflixers...